Page 1 of The Secret to Swooning
In Which Lady Ann Refuses a Proposal
Lady Ann Martins sat on a bench in Hyde Park, entirely oblivious. A pack of feral children could tumble in front of her and climb upon one another’s shoulders until they formed a tower as tall as Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and she’d not register the activity. Lord Byron could stalk past wearing nothing but hessians, and she’d not bat an eyelash, because she wouldn’t have seen a single inch of the naked poet’s backside.
Frustration in matters of the heart could do that, make the world outside the chest and mind disappear entirely. Matters of the heart? With Viscount Trevor? Ha. That particular organ had never been involved.
Her face scrunched up further. Her mother would warn of wrinkles.
“If you frown any harder, Ann my sweet, you’d better hope it doesn’t rain.” A warm body with a voice as familiar as her own sat next to her, nudged her with an elbow. Everette Blake, Viscount Dartmore, future Earl of Bennington. She did not have to turn her head and see his face to know him.
Ann grunted to hide the sound of her fluttering heart. Withhim, her heart considered itself fully involved. Had for a year. Perhaps longer. Ever since he’d stolen her away from theobscurity of the wall at the Malton’s ball and sent her spinning round the dance floor. A rogue was an odd friend for a proper lady such as herself to have, but she kept the secret tightly to her chest, her only rebellion in a life of obedience.
“If it does rain,” Lord Dartmore persisted, “you’ll likely collect a river. Right here.” He stroked a line between her eyebrows from forehead to nose with the tip of his gloved finger.
She should jerk away from him. Gloves did little to quench the heat of a rogue’s touch, and sheknewbetter. But she only ever found herself leaning closer. With him, she broke the rules with ease, broke her own chains as if they were made of mere paper.
“If you collect a river…” He sighed. “You’ll drown. And then I’ll be in mourning for at least a year. Two perhaps.”
She regarded him with steely apathy.
He whistled. “You really are suffering the doldrums, aren’t you. I’ve never seen you with anything less than perfect posture. What troubles you so?”
She looked up to the sky. “Lord Trevor will not be proposing to me.”
“Thought you had him all but leg-shackled.”
She’d thought so too. The culmination of all her training, all her mother’s wishes and her father’s hopes. “He’s to marry another. Miss Shropshire.”
“Do I know her?” He grinned, bumped his shoulder into hers. “Only woman I can seem to remember is you.”
She rolled her eyes. The incurable flirt. But her belly flipped over as it always did, pleading with her to return his flirtations—to forget the books on good behavior, the strict training to be a proper debutante and lady, her parents approving, loving smiles when she succeeded. There would be no smiles from them if she did as she wished and flirted with the man beside her.
So she chained the impulse up tight, locked it away.
“Ann?” A cajoling voice. “Do you wish to tell me more? Or do you wish me to find the man and show him my fist? No one plays with my Ann’s affections and escapes unscathed.”
Her heart skipped a beat, and she breathed steady and slow to tame it.
“You should not flirt so. It’s not proper.”
“You like it.”
She did.
Lord Dartmore pinned her with the most serious look she’d ever seen from him. “He dashed your hopes. I’ll murder him. But first, how are you feeling?”
“Frustrated. Angry.” He’d been her last hope for marriage, for a future as something other than a forgettable spinster. She’d worked so hard to catch his eye and keep it. The pianoforte playing, the knowledge of proper dress, the important bits of Debrett’s, memorized perfectly. Every step to every dance and every proper address for every personage. She could even watercolor with some skill. But she did not care for any of it. “Do my achievements count for nothing?”
Silence.
In that caesura, she had a terrible thought. “Does”—she swallowed hard—“my obedience count for nothing?”
Large, warm hands cupped her shoulders, turned her body. More scandalous touches she should shrink from. And did not. Dartmore’s hands felt like freedom, not chains.
“Ann.” His voice, rich as honey, pleaded, “Open your eyes, Ann.”
She did. And looked straight into coffee-brown pools of care that wiped out the park around them, that wove a fairy circle of solitude around only them two. A scandal for his hands to be on her just so, but the freedom his touch evoked dissolved all that care into nothing.
“He’s a prig,” Dartmore said, “and doesn’t deserve you.”
